Households can be one of two things: owned or rented. The homeownership rate equals the share of households that are owned. Therefore, a rise in the homeownership rate indicates a rise in the number of households electing to own their home rather than rent in a given area. Essentially, homeownership can provide an idea of [...]Read Full Article →

Every year the Demographics Research Group is asked to give presentations on Virginia’s demographic trends, and this year, as is true every year, the demographic trends we explored depended on our audience’s area of interest —school enrollment change for the Board of Education, population growth trends for the House Appropriations Committee, or population [...]Read Full Article →

During the last three decades, growth in the U.S. working age population, ages 20 to 65, has easily outpaced total U.S. population growth. But in coming decades further growth in the working-age population is on track to be considerably slower, increasing at less than half the rate of the rest of the population. As the [...]Read Full Article →

In June, the National Center for Health Statistics released the total number of births in the U.S. during 2015. Given that the economy has been growing for six years since the recession ended in 2009, most economists were expecting the number of births to increase. However, there were actually fewer births in 2015 than [...]Read Full Article →

Black households earn more in mid-Atlantic states, particularly in Virginia, than in any other state where Blacks make up a substantial portion of the population. As the previous post noted, neither the region’s overall wealth nor the concentration of federal government jobs in mid-Atlantic states fully accounts for why higher income Black households are [...]Read Full Article →

One of the most persistent statistics in American demography has been the gap that exists between Black Americans’ incomes and the rest of the population. But among those who identified themselves as Black or African American in 2014, there were noticeable geographic differences in their incomes. In states with a substantial Black population, Virginia, [...]Read Full Article →

Loudoun County, in Northern Virginia’s outer suburbs, was Virginia’s fastest growing locality in the 1990s and 2000s, nearly doubling its population each decade. Population growth in Loudoun, as in much of Virginia during the two decades was fueled by people moving out to newly built subdivisions on the edges of the commonwealth’s largest metro areas. [...]Read Full Article →

Here is a fun map showing the distribution of people across Virginia by the density of their census tract. Each color represents one third of the total population. For the purposes of this post, I’ll refer to them as the “densest third,” the “middle third,” and the “sparsest third.” I’m tempted to call them the [...]Read Full Article →

When people begin house hunting, one of the most common criteria they consider is the quality of the local school district, not just for the sake of their children but also because schools often influence home values. The District of Columbia’s Office of Revenue Analysis recently mapped the standardized test results of each DC [...]Read Full Article →